The invention relates to a method and a system for approximately reproducing the surface of a workpiece machined with a milling cutter. The invention also relates to a computer program product for carrying out the method and to a computer programmed with the computer program product.
Such method can be applied, for example, to reconstruct or simulate a surface, e.g., a surface of a workpiece to be machined with a milling cutter. The workpiece to be machined its usually modeled with a so-called CAD-system (CAD=computer-aided design). An approximation of the actually produced surface of the workpiece is typically obtained by interpolating target points of a milling cutter in a milling process. One method performed to date for such approximation is the so-called polyhedrization of the geometry of the milling cutter and a computation of polyhedral intersections. The polyhedrization of the milling cutter can cause numerical problem when calculating the intersections and is also particularly complex and time-consuming.